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Tag: school choice

Last month, the Orthodox Union, a prominent Jewish organization, launched a campaign advocating for private school choice policies. That raised hackles from Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU), which condemned the chutzpah of the Orthodox Union to work for equal funding for children in their community:

“It [the campaign] will require us to stop being timid,” [Orthodox Union executive vice president Allen Fagin] said. “We pay our taxes, and our kids are also entitled not to be left behind.”

That statement, of course, is only half-true: Fagin’s constituents do pay their taxes, and their children are indeed entitled to an education. But that’s exactly what public schools are for. OU’s campaign relies on the same faulty logic we’ve seen from advocates of voucher programs: Because parents pay taxes, they should be able to ask every other taxpayer in the state to subsidize their child’s religious education. It’s a clear constitutional violation. […]

It’s unconscionable (and exceptionally brazen) for OU to demand that further funds be siphoned away from public schools intended to serve entire communities in order to promote their private religious agenda. If Orthodox parents want to place their children in religious schools, that’s their right. And it’s their responsibility to pay for it.

In reality though, it’s the idea that so-called “public” schools are actually “public” that is only half-true. District schools are technically open to any student whose parents can afford to live in the district, but they are certainly not “intended to serve entire communities.” For example, they are not intended to serve Orthodox Jews or others like them who have a different vision of education. When everyone is forced to pay for one school system and decisions about education are made via a political process, there will be winners and losers.

State legislatures across the nation are considering an innovative new education reform: education savings accounts. Hailed as “School Choice 2.0,” ESAs empower parents to customize their child’s education beyond the school walls—a development that could substantially alter the way students are educated. There is “no reason to expect that the future market will have the shape or form that our present market has,” observed Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman in a 2003 interview, “How do we know how education will develop? Why is it sensible for a child to get all his or her schooling in one brick building?”

Two states have already enacted ESA laws. In Arizona, parents of eligible students that opt out of their assigned district school can access 90% of what the state of Arizona would have spent on those students. The Arizona Department of Education deposits the funds directly into a privately managed bank account that parents can access through a restricted-use debit card. The parents can then spend the ESA funds on any qualifying education-related service or provider they choose. In the first year, eligibility was restricted to students with special needs. Since then, Arizona has expanded eligibility to include children in foster care, children of military personnel, and children assigned to low-performing district schools. Last year, Florida adopted a special-needs ESA law similar to Arizona’s except that it is privately managed.

Today, National Affairspublished an essay I coauthored with Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation. Our essay explores the administrative, regulatory, and constitutional issues that policymakers will have to address when designing an ESA law. Policymakers should consider crafting a privately managed and privately funded ESA law that offers tax credits in return for donations to scholarship organizations that manage the ESAs. Florida’s privately managed model is already proving to be more operationally efficient and effective than Arizona’s government-run model. A privately managed ESA would be less susceptible to capture by hostile parties than a government agency, more likely to generate and retain best practices, and more likely to have the ability and incentives to be responsive to the needs of families. Privately funded ESAs also have several advantages over government-funded ESA laws. In particular, they are more likely to pass constitutional muster in states with restrictive “Blaine amendments” and less likely to include burdensome regulations that undermine the effectiveness of the program.

We conclude:

Most school choice programs offer significant but not revolutionary changes to the traditional educational model. But true educational choice, and the educational market it could help foster, promise to radically improve education for many children. As Milton Friedman observed, “not all ‘schooling’ is ‘education’ and not all ‘education’ is ‘schooling.’” Charter schools and voucher programs still conflate the two, but education savings accounts embody a more expansive understanding of education.

ESAs offer several key advantages over traditional school choice programs. Because families can spend ESA funds at multiple providers and can save unspent funds for later, ESAs incentivize families to economize and maximize the value of each dollar spent in a manner similar to spending their own money. ESAs also create incentives for education providers to unbundle services and products to better meet students’ individual learning needs. […] These laws hold great potential to expand educational opportunity and remake the entire education system in ways that better and more efficiently meet the needs of children.

A few weeks ago, the Sun-Sentinel ran an error-filled editorial against educational choice. Since then, it has refused to run a retraction or even a correction of its numerous errors, including:

Falsely claiming that the legislature enacted a “massive expansion” of the scholarship tax credit law this year;

Mistakenly relying on the moot fiscal analysis of a dead bill;

Misreading that analysis to report a “deficit” when it actually reports savings;

Falsely claiming that a separate fiscal analysis by the legislature’s budget office relied on “information provided by [private] schools.”

That list does not include several additional misleading comparisons and crucial omissions that were also brought to their attention.

Last week, they ran a rebuttal by Doug Tuthill, president of the Step Up for Students scholarship organization. However, they subsequently published a bellicose letter from Wayne Blanton, the executive director of the Florida School Boards Association, which attempts to rebut Tuthill… by repeating the same errors as the Sun-Sentinel editorial.

Blanton opened his letter by accusing Tuthill of “attempting to deceive the public,” but not a single one of Blanton’s accusations has any merit. Indeed, Blanton’s accusation better describes his own letter. Let us address his claims in order.

Over the weekend, Florida’s Sun-Sentineleditorialized against Florida’s scholarship tax credit law. But, as I detail at Education Next today, the editorial was rife with errors, distortions, and omissions of crucial context. Here’s just one example of many:

Rather than put the scholarship tax credit law in the context of Florida’s overall education spending, the Sun-Sentinel compares it to… Iowa.

“No state has a bigger voucher [sic] system. Last year, Florida spent $286 million on just 2.7 percent of all students. Iowa spent $13.5 million on 2.6 percent of its students.”

Setting aside the fact that the state of Florida did not “spend” even one red penny on the scholarships, this comparison is misleading. Do the editors at the Sun-Sentinel really believe that Iowa has as many students as Florida? If so, why haven’t they decried the fact that Florida spends more than $25 billion on its public schools while Iowa spends barely $5 billion? Perhaps because Florida has more than five times the number of students?

Comparing apples to apples, fewer than 10,500 students received tax-credit scholarships in Iowa last year compared to more than 69,000 in Florida. And while the tax-credit scholarships are larger in Florida than Iowa – about $4,660 on average versus about $1,090 on average – they are dwarfed by the more than $10,000 per pupil spent on average at Florida public schools.

The Sun-Sentinel owes its readers and the public a full and detailed retraction.

Just in time for Halloween, a vampire lawsuit against school choice has risen from the dead.

Nearly a month ago, a Florida judge dismissed the Florida Education Association’s (FEA) lawsuit against a bill amending the state’s school choice laws, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue because they were not harmed. The union wanted to block the creation of the Personalized Learning Scholarship Accounts program for students with special needs, and “in particular” the so-called “expansion” of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (FTCS) law, which provides tax credits to corporations in return for donations to nonprofit scholarship organizations that help low-income children attend the schools of their choice. There are two additional lawsuits against school choice in Florida, including another involving the FEA.

This year, nearly 70,000 low-income students received FTCS scholarships. One former scholarship recipient, Denisha Merriweather, recently wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal explaining how the FTCS allowed her to switch from her assigned district school, which failed to meet her needs, to a private school where she thrived.

Last week, the FEA filed an amended complaint with additional plaintiffs. The union argues that the new plaintiffs have standing as district school teachers and parents of district school students because they “are threatened by the implementation of […] the expansion of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program,” which they claim would cause the district schools to “[lose] considerable funding” since the scholarship funds “that otherwise would go to support the public schools are instead redirected through an intermediary to provide vouchers [sic] for Florida children to attend private schools.” (The FEA’s complaint did not discuss the impact of the Personalized Learning Scholarship Accounts.)

The union’s argument suffers from at least two fatal flaws.

First, the FTCS does not “redirect” any state funds. The state of Florida allocates funds to school, in part, on a per-pupil basis, but the fiscal impact of a student leaving her assigned district school to accept a tax-credit scholarship is no different than the fiscal impact of a student moving out of the district, attending private school without a scholarship, or homeschooling. Moreover, if the funds were actually “redirected” then the state would not realize any savings. In fact, the state’s own Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability found that the FTCS generates significant savings ($36.2 million in 2008-09) because the forgone revenue is less than the reduction in state expenditures.

Second, the union is factually incorrect in asserting that the challenged legislation, SB 850, “expanded” the FTCS. The bill loosened eligibility requirements by eliminating the requirement that recipients spend the prior academic year in a district school; allowing foster students to continue receiving scholarships if adopted; and raising the income thresholds for eligibility for full and partial scholarships. However, the bill did not expand the amount of tax credits available nor did it add any new credits against other taxes. In other words, while the bill increased the number of students who can apply for scholarships, it did not increase the actual amount of available tax credits or scholarship funds.

The FEA’s vampire lawsuit misunderstands how the FTCS law works and misstates the facts about what the legislation does. The judge should drive a stake through its heart.

Yesterday, Democrats for Public Education (DFPE) released the results of a poll that supposedly shows a high degree of public support for their agenda:

All of the progressive reforms elicit solid majority endorsement (ranging from 60% to 80% buy-in), while none of the conservative reforms come remotely close to a majority (ranging from 40% to 10% buy-in). Note the steep drop-off from the last progressive reform (increase teacher pay) to the top conservative reform (test scores for teacher evaluations). [Emphasis in the original.]

What an amazing coincidence! The public favors exactly what DFPE proposes!

But let’s look at how they phrased the “proposed reforms”:

Notice how all the so-called “progressive reforms” sound positive (“engaging curriculum” “overcome challenges”) and sometimes even explicitly connect the reform to some positive outcome (“help disadvantaged students”). Are teachers’ “due process rights” (read: tenure) really about their ability to “advocate for the things that students need” or more about protecting incompetent teachers from being fired?

School choice programs expand educational opportunity, but at what cost?

Opponents of school choice frequently claim that vouchers and scholarship tax credits “siphon” money from public schools and increase the overall cost of education to the taxpayers. However, these critics generally fail to consider the reduction in expenses associated with students switching out of the district school system, wrongly assuming that all or most school costs are fixed. When students leave, they claim, a school cannot significantly reduce its costs because it cannot cut back on its major expenses, like buildings, utilities, and labor. But if that were true, then schools would require little to no additional funds to teach additional students. A proper fiscal analysis considers both the diverted or decreased revenue as well as the reduction in expenses related to variable costs.

A new study by Jeff Spalding, Director of Fiscal Policy at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, does exactly that. The study examines the fiscal impact of 10 of the 21 school voucher programs nationwide, finding a cumulative savings to states of at least $1.7 billion over two decades. Spalding, the former comptroller/CFO for the city of Indianapolis, is cautious, methodical, and transparent in his analysis. He walks readers through the complex process of determining the fiscal impact of each program, identifying the impact of each variable and explaining equation along the way. He also makes relatively conservative assumptions, such as counting food service and interscholastic athletics as fixed costs even though they are variable with enrollment. Critically, Spalding accounts for those students who would have attended private school anyway, explaining:

One common complicating factor is student eligibility. If a voucher program allows students already enrolled in a private school to qualify, then those students do not directly relieve the public school system of any costs. Thus, there is a new public cost incurred for the vouchers provided to those students, but no corresponding savings for the public school system. Anytime voucher eligibility extends to students not currently enrolled in a public school, the net savings calculation must include that complicating factor.

States save money when the variable cost of each student to the district schools is greater than the cost of the voucher, accounting for the students who would have attended private school anyway. After wading through each state’s byzantine school funding formula, Spalding calculated that the voucher programs reduced expenditures across all 10 programs by $4.5 billion over two decades while costing states $2.8 billion, producing $1.7 billion in savings.

In the last 40 years, government spending on K-12 education has nearly tripled while results have been flat. Moreover, the Census Bureau projects that the elderly will make up an increasingly larger share of the population in the coming decades, straining state budgets with spending on health care and retirement benefits. Schools will have to compete with hospitals and nursing homes for scarce resources.